<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Kiss Goodbye by crookedspoon</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27235105">Kiss Goodbye</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/crookedspoon/pseuds/crookedspoon'>crookedspoon</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Exchange Fics [81]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Gen, Introspection, Loneliness, POV Gideon Nav, Pining, Post-Harrow the Ninth (Locked Tomb Trilogy), ToT: Battle of the Bands, Trick or Treat 2020</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 22:07:44</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,082</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27235105</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/crookedspoon/pseuds/crookedspoon</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Gideon is alone and it's all too fucking familiar.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Exchange Fics [81]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/51139</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>52</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Trick or Treat Exchange 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Kiss Goodbye</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/inquisitor_tohru/gifts">inquisitor_tohru</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This was inspired by a melange of Starset songs, with "Dark on Me" taking the lead. Hope you enjoy!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The scene is all too fucking familiar, like falling into the same shitty nightmare that awaits you every night on the edge of sleep. Except, Gideon wishes it were just a nightmare. This... this is worse. She didn't come back for this.</p><p>She didn't <em>want </em>to come back in the first place. She'd made her peace. She'd fucking <em>died.</em> <i>Do you have any idea how much courage that takes? </i>Not much it turns out, if <em>this </em>is the alternative. Just her luck. Harrow never did make anything fucking <em>easy </em>for her, so why complain now?</p><p>Fluorescent light stings her eyes like a chemical burn, ricocheting off the high metal shine burnished into the walls and ceiling. She sorely misses the blood and gunge Harrow had used to tastefully decorate her rooms like a slaughterhouse in case Gideon Senior decided to show up for another midnight round of hide and go murder. That was, well, <em>harrowing,</em> to be quite frank. The only reprieve for her eyes is the black void of space that sucks her gaze through the giant plex window. Gideon has spent months bobbing somewhere in the back of Harrow's brain, watching pinpricks of stars in the distance that looked so different from the ones you'd see above the Ninth if you made it all the way to the top of the shaft.</p><p>She'd always longed to see space. It would have meant she'd achieved her ultimate goal of escaping the horror of the Ninth House. Now, she's almost homesick for it. She'd hated the place with every fibre of her being, but if Harrow were there, Gideon would put on her walking boots and traverse the whole of the goddamn universe to get back to that dreary shithole.</p><p><em>Fuck, </em>she's pathetic. Infected with an advanced case of Nonagesimitis. Terminal. Many times over, it seems, since she's already croaked of it once before and that didn't cleanse her of it. </p><p>Gideon exhales shakily and scrubs the space on her chest that should have a gaping hole in it or ribs crushed beyond recognition. Pain is caving it in as if the fence were still an ornament piercing her body. But she's in Harrow's body and the hole in her chest is conspicuously absent. She'd always been convinced that Harrow didn't have a heart, or if she did, that it would be shriveled and black like her soul. But as far as Gideon can tell it's beating like a normal heart in a normal chest devoid of holes, and not like the mummified thing Gideon would have expected.</p><p>But fuck, it <em>hurts.</em> And she doesn't mean her ribs that have been recently crushed by the River.</p><p>She pulls her hands – Harrow's hands – away. It feels wrong somehow to touch her body when her umbral mistress is not around to give her shit about it. God, but she misses that lemon-pucker of her face. Even wearing it, Gideon can't imitate that special Nonagesimus brand of <i>fed-up-with-you.</i> It's just sad when she tries.</p><p>Every time she looks in the mirror, she startles anew, as though it's not a mirror, but a glass wall with Harrow on the other side. But Harrow's eyes only gawked this stupidly out of her face when Gideon had been choking the life out of her, and that hadn't happened in quite a few years. Though not for the lack of trying.</p><p>Now, her own eyes are gawking back at her, the yellow too bright for Harrow's hawkish face, blanching her pasty skin even more than usual. Especially above the thin hospital gown that makes her look like a puked-out peppermint.</p><p>Gideon wants to punch something. If she were in her own body, she'd have cracked the fucking mirror just to get rid of her reflection in it. In Harrow's body, however, she doesn't have the strength to so much as split her knuckles if she punched the mirror. And if she did, her freakish healing powers would just knit the skin back together before the blood had finished beading on the surface.</p><p>This is so not satisfying. <i>Come back here, Nonagesimus, you maggot. I'm living rent-free in your head, bet you'd like to come collect now.</i></p><p>Instead of punching the mirror, she slings Harrow's noodle arms around her bony shoulders. Which makes her feel even more pathetic.</p><p>She hates this. She's been alone on the Ninth, but never this alone. There was always Harrow to torment, Crux to vex, and Aiglamene to wheedle into giving her more lessons in sword fighting.</p><p><i>Okay, you win, </i>she thinks. <i>You've brought the mighty Gideon Nav to her knees and you didn't even have to be around to do it. Satisfied? Now come back and reclaim your stupid bird-bone body. It's claustrophic in here, but I'd readily share. Or, you know, become Lyctor food, as originally planned. You dying and leaving me behind was not on the menu.</i></p><p>"Nav, you colossal <em>idiot,"</em> she tells herself out loud, just to hear that wretched gremlin voice she'd hated so much only a year ago. If her past self could see her now, trapped in the body of the girl she'd aspired to make suffer as much as she could in her lowly position of Ninth liability – the girl who spited her at every turn and rather lived in bitterness and hate than to let Gideon go, to give her the freedom she so craved, and be rid of her forever.</p><p>Where is that girl now? She should be here to order Gideon around. </p><p>"I'm going to undress and take a shower now – in <em>your </em>naked body – so you better stop me, Nonagesimus."</p><p>Nothing. She doesn't know why she still tries. Probably because there's no good reason not to. Their antagonism must surely extend beyond the River. There has to be some thread she can pull if she could just find the right words. Like an incantation or whatever. The last thing she wants is to give Harrow the satisfaction of being able to accuse of her absconding with her body and of not trying absolutely everything in her power to draw her back. Though there's no reason she'd want that. With this excuse of a body, she couldn't even hope to fulfill her lifelong dream of joining the Cohort. Never in a million years would she pass the physical screening.</p><p><i>Well, </i>she thinks as she scrubs her knuckles across Harrow's naked lips, <i>that's one dream at least she can </i>properly <i>kiss goodbye.</i> </p><p>Unlike certain others.</p>
  </div></div>
</body>
</html>